Storytelling: How to Make People Feel Something

The goal of storytelling is not to convince or make people think something. It’s to make them feel something. And there’s not a more powerful tool out there for making people feel something than a great story. So put more emotion into your storytelling!

Remember, storytelling triggers memories and ignites emotional responses to create a bond with your clients and prospects. People don’t make decisions with the rational parts of their brains. They make choices based on feelings encouraging more effective sales conversations.

Make People Feel Something Because You Want Your Business to be Successful

Tap into your audience’s decisions. Make them feel something – happiness, hopefulness, anger, disappointment. People respond deeply and emotionally to storytelling. If you want your business to be successful, make people feel something with these five basics of storytelling:

1. Catch Your Audience’s Attention

Tell your audience something that will catch their attention. Make them feel excited. Make them care about what’s happening and about your story’s characters.

2. Provide Good Story Structure

Good story structure is simply a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Your story plots should catch attention, be based on conflict and challenge in your audience’s businesses, and share a successful outcome.

3. Connect with Your Audience

To connect with your audience, use personal experiences. Stories are the best way to do that on an emotional level. Sharing personal experiences makes you real, authentic, and relatable.

4. Show Change Happening

Show your characters working for and accomplishing goals. Share how their desires were thwarted and how they may have even failed. Throw in some scary situations, too, but always tell how they eventually succeeded.

Showing characters changing within your story is critical. If you craft your story well and show change happening in a character, you’ll cause a change in the audience, too.

5. Be Authentic

Our ability to remember data is quite limited. So don’t dump information onto your audience. Pull them in with effective storytelling and tap into its power to make people feel something. People don’t buy your products or services. They buy you and the solutions you have for their problems. When you dump persuasive statistics and numeric information onto your audience, they can retain only a very small part of it. But if you pull them in by presenting information in the form of a story, they’ll remember more of it.

I don’t want to lead you into thinking that data is unimportant, but it should be used to improve your storytelling and support your authenticity. If you bombard your audience with facts and data too heavily, and you fail to make people feel something, your story will feel serious or straitlaced. And who wants to feel that?

Make People Feel Something Because You Want Your Audience to be Successful

Storytelling is the number one business tool in the world. And those that have learned to use it to make people feel something are among the most successful brands on Earth.

Successful businesses aren’t successful because their banner ads are great, or because they use data well. Yes, advertising is vital in getting your message across to your audience. And the good use of data is key to the success of your business. But good storytelling has the power to make people feel something and make choices based on those feelings effectively.

Start building real value, better relationships, and a successful business. Learn how to tell better stories to make people feel something. It’s as simple as that.